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Friday, 13 March 2015

In Praise of IT Gurus - Highly Amusing post by Peter Fritze

It is my great pleasure to welcome friend and fellow author Peter Fritze to these pages. Peter writes riveting crime novels featuring the high stakes world of lawyers. This post made me smile and cringe...read it and you'll see. Haven't we all been there, in some way?

Back From the Void

by Peter Fritze

I’m recently out with my second book, False Guilt. Like my first, The
Case for Killing, it uses a fictional Toronto law firm, Collins, Shaw LLP,
as a loose backdrop.

The protagonists in both books are lawyers with, well,
issues. I hope it goes without saying that the lawyers are fictional like the
law firm. Being sued is not my idea of a good time.

Both protagonists are professionally very competent. Their
issues are personal. And doozies. Without flawed characters, what would there
be to write about?

In my first years as a lawyer, I didn’t always feel graced
with competence. Like any profession, it took a while to get the requisite
experience under my belt. And occasionally technology wasn’t my friend.

My most acute experience in this regard was when I joined a
downtown Toronto firm from a government agency as a fifth year associate. It
was a long time ago; here’s my recollection of events.

The firm was handling a lot of deals. After only a few
weeks, at 4:00 p.m. on a Friday, I was brought in to junior on a large merger.

My first task was to draft a merger agreement for
circulation to all the parties Monday morning at 10:00. Government work hadn’t
taught me how to draft huge corporate documents and the partner-in-charge knew
that. He pointed me to the precedent system and said I could call for help any
time over the weekend.

After three cognacs at home that evening, I was ready for
the challenge. I worked all weekend. By Sunday evening, I had a presentable
document—of about 130 pages—for the partner to review early Monday morning. If memory
serves, I only called him once. Anything more, I figured, was a career-limiting
move.

And then, about 8:00 Sunday evening, as I made finishing
touches on my computer, the latest draft of the document disappeared from the IT
system. I never learned why but I’m pretty sure it was my fault. Yup. Gone
without a trace. Vanished. Lost in the void.

A little technological context here. The firm’s system was
first rate, but this was the late 1980s. By today’s standards, everything was rudimentary.
And locating a backup? That definitely was for the IT department.

Except, horror upon horror upon horror, it was Sunday
evening. Who would be around? And the changes from earlier drafts of the
document had been mammoth. There was no way I had the time or energy to start
the revisions over. But there also was no way I was greeting the partner Monday
morning with a stubbly face, dark rings under my eyes and a half-assed
document. That would be a real career-limiting move.

For an hour, I searched and searched some more. Throughout,
I groaned with panic. Eventually, a kind evenings-and-weekends assistant heard
me. “Oh, call this pager number,” she said. “It’s for IT. If it’s important enough,
they’ll come in.”

Come in? On a Sunday
evening? Now that definitelywasn’t
something I’d seen at the government. By 9:30, the document was back on my
computer screen. And Monday morning, the partner had a hard copy on his desk. I
acted as if drafting it had been a walk in the park. More like a walk into
quicksand. For days after, I offered profuse thanks to the IT person for saving
me. Eventually he told me to shut up.

My protagonists worry about murder, not lost documents. But
for those sixty minutes on that Sunday, to me, the horror seemed just as real.

What's your worst IT catastrophe, Readers? Share with us here in the comments!

False Guilt

Paul Tews, a rising Toronto mergers and acquisitions lawyer,
is on a leave of absence for anxiety. An invitation to Rome from a woman with
whom he’d once had a close encounter seems like a perfect remedy. Instead he
finds that all things captivating have an ugly side. Friends confess baffling
secrets. An art collector leads a double life. Passion deceives.

Paul must save himself from it all—and his past involvement
with murder.

Peter
Fritze practiced law as a solicitor in an Ontario government agency, partner in
a major Toronto law firm and general counsel of a Canadian multinational. He’s
now following his lifetime interest in storytelling by writing thrillers.

In
April 2014, Peter self-published The Case for
Killing. It’s the tale of two plans for murder colliding against
the backdrop of a fictitious Toronto law firm, Collins, Shaw LLP.

False
Guilt was self-published
in February 2015. Taking place in Toronto and Rome, a Collins, Shaw lawyer battles
his past involvement with murder.

Peter
was born in Hamilton, Canada and raised in nearby Dundas. He now lives in
Toronto.

9 comments:

Peter, I smiled widely when reading this! I was a BBS sysop in the 1990s, before the internet was fully established. This made me rather smug about my computer abilities. Now, I curse every time I have to 'learn' a new Word version! IT people are like doctors. I need them for my health :)

The worst thing that happened to me was losing a whole set of report cards to the great computer space, which I barely understood then and understand even less now. The really bad thing - I was the principal and I had bragged I could read all the teachers' reports online. I got saved by a darling IT guy too! I tried to marry him but he already had a wife and my husband said no too. So all I could do was say thanks. Love the sound of your books, Peter. I'm gonna git me one.

My biggest IT near disaster wasn't my fault - for once. The guy who would later become my husband... and later still my ex, was setting up my computer. We were flirting while he worked He must have got a bit distracted because I caught him, just in time, about to delete my hard drive.